The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
– David Foster Wallace
This Day In History
Infinite Jest is published (February 1,1996)
Wallace wrote about television at a pivotal moment. In 1997, broadcast TV was not yet supplanted by streaming services, nor were the internet or social media the great sucking maws of time and attention they have since become. But at least he was not snootily deriding the medium from the outside. He called himself a TV addict, watching television pretty much indiscriminately as “an easy way to fill in the emptiness.” As a recovering drug addict, he knew something about addiction and how dealers profit from grooming users. In “E Unibus Pluram,” he analyzed how TV ensnared its viewers and emptied their pockets. Most TV criticism, he argued, indicted the medium for lacking any meaningful connection with the world outside it.
There was a generation gap between TV viewers. Those who started watching television before about 1970 watched it very differently from those who came to it later. You could call the former TV viewers modern and the latter post-modern. Those who started watching TV in the 1960s were trained to look where TV pointed, Wallace argued—“usually at versions of ‘real life’ made prettier, sweeter, livelier by succumbing to some product or temptation.” But no longer: “Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what is not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.”
Post-modern viewers, in this sense, were like dogs.
Around 1970, TV became self-reflexive; it did not need real life to justify its existence. Something similar happened to literature. Realistic fiction was ostensibly about what it portrayed; post-modern meta-fiction turned from the world and withdrew into itself, drawing attention to the conditions of its construction in ironic and absurdist ways, often by playfully engaging with mass culture and the society of the spectacle. This change in literature, and its poisonous consequences for how we live, troubled Wallace when he wrote “E Unibus Pluram.”
He cited Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, in which there’s a fabulously absurd passage involving a pop-culture scholar called Murray and his friend Jack. On their way to visit a tourist attraction, they drive past signs directing them to the most photographed barn in America, walk up a cow path past a kiosk selling postcards of the barn, and finally join tourists taking photographs of the barn. “Can you feel it, Jack?” Murray asks. “An accumulation of nameless energies . . . Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender . . . We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colours our vision. A religious experience in a way . . . They are taking pictures of taking pictures.”
What fascinated Wallace about this passage was not so much the parodic regress—the tourists watching the barn, Murray watching the tourists, Jack watching Murray, us watching Jack watching Murray watching the tourists watching the barn—but Murray’s assumption of the role of scientific critic at a remove from the culture of gawping. Wallace’s sense was that we’re all gawpers now, lens-dangling barn-watchers as much as pop-cultural theorists. The most absurd aspect of this parodic regress is the person who thinks he can stand outside it, observing with ironic detachment.
Excerpt from Everything: All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries
Early reviews contributed to Infinite Jest‘s hype, many of them describing it as a momentous literary event. In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Steven Moore called the book “a profound study of the postmodern condition.” In 2004, Chad Harbach declared that, in retrospect, Infinite Jest “now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit.”
In a 2008 retrospective by The New York Times, it was described as “a masterpiece that’s also a monster—nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric.”
Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
As Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest is at the center of the new discipline of “Wallace Studies”, which, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “… is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.”
Not all critics were as laudatory. Some early reviews, such as Michiko Kakutani’s in The New York Times, were mixed, recognizing the inventiveness of the writing but criticizing the length and plot. She called the novel “a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace’s mind.”[43] In the London Review of Books, Dale Peck wrote of the novel, “… it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and—perhaps especially—uncontrolled.”
Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, called it “just awful” and written with “no discernible talent” (in the novel, Bloom’s own work is called “turgid”). Ha!
In a review of Wallace’s work up to the year 2000, A. O. Scott wrote of Infinite Jest, “[T]he novel’s Pynchonesque elements…feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off.”
Some critics have since qualified their initial stances. In 2008, A. O. Scott called Infinite Jest an “enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition” and Wallace “the best mind of his generation”. James Wood has said that he regrets his negative review: “I wish I’d slowed down a bit more with David Foster Wallace.”
Infinite Jest is one of the recommendations in Kakutani’s book Ex Libris: 100 Books to Read and Reread.
Sourced @ Wikipedia.
Think we can all agree, crazy as hell to write an eleven-hundred-page novel, with 388 endnotes, some of which themselves have footnotes. Please tell me there’s an easier way.
Imagine Rolling Stone sent a writer along with David Foster Wallace on a book tour and they talked non-stop for five days, thereabouts.
With the tape recorder running.
Rolling Stone doesn’t even like the article, so he turns it into a best-selling book, which becomes a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.
Know just what you are thinking.
The Dog could’ve done that.
I don’t think so.
Instead of offing himself, DFW – rhymes with a Texas airport – would’ve killed me instead.
And if he’d shot me dead, he’d get away with it like Johnny Depp and some other unrequited wordsmith would cover the televised celebrity trial and write a magazine article and you know how this ends.
You can see ol’ Jack Sparrow playing me.
